America on the ballot chooses the future. Barbed wire around the White House
Last rallies, at the polls a country deeply divided between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Few will decide who will be president. Riots are feared
from New York Marco Valsania and Luca Veronese
4' min read
Key points
4' min read
What to watch out for on election night in the United States? On the map - also on the map that will be updated, as we go along, with exit polls and projections - mark Montgomery County, Pennsylvania: 800,000 inhabitants in all, north of Philadelphia
It will most likely be areas like this, unknown to most, that will decide who will be the next President of the United States. A few thousand votes in the swing states will make the difference, and those votes will come from the uncertain counties in the swing states.
Head-to-head in the polls
.An America deeply divided between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump goes to the polls in a climate of high tension, with extraordinary security measures (including new six-foot fences and barbed-wire barricades around the White House and the Capitol) and polls that never in the history of the country have shown such an open battle: all prisoners - after a campaign that was at times violent and vulgar - of tiny margins, fractions of a percentage point, included in the statistical error, and therefore useless to understand on the eve of the polls who will prevail.
According to the most accredited analyses: Harris starts with a historic endowment of 226 large voters, Trump already has 210 in his pocket. To win, under the American electoral system, one needs at least 270 out of 538. At stake, amidst last-minute surprises, are 93 large voters still to be assigned.
The Contested States
.The seven contested states - from the Midwest to the Southeast and Pennsylvania - are a microcosm of the country, and from their counties they can anticipate the final results: they have voters who are often still overwhelmingly white, without college degrees. Their landscape is made up of vast rural areas, but with an increasing presence of minorities and growth of urban suburbs. There's Montgomery, which won the Democrats in 2020 with a net gain of 40,000 votes over 2016, more than half the number it took Joe Biden to win the whole of Pennsylvania. Or Lackawanna, with the old industrial centre of Scranton, where Harris began his final day of campaigning yesterday before the final rally-concert in Philadelphia, where stars such as Lady Gaga and Oprah Winfrey arrived.
